1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a system and method for programming a testing system, and, more particularly, to a system and method for programming a multistation system to test a circuit assembly.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic products such as televisions typically contain one or more circuit boards manufactured by an assembly line. One method of testing a circuit board, after manufacture, is to insert the board in its product. If the product then operates, the board is deemed to be good. If the product does not operate, the board is deemed to be defective. One option in dealing with a defective board is to discard it. This option is often undesirable, however, because a board can be expensive to manufacture. Another option is to have a technician manually locate the defect on the board by probing with an oscilloscope, for example. A problem with this second option is substantial labor cost for the technicians time.
Another method of testing a circuit board, after manufacture, is to employ automatic test machines that can detect a defective board and, sometimes, automatically diagnose a board defect. It has often been desirable to employ multiple different types of test machines, each type being optimized to use certain methods to find certain kinds of defects. These different types of machines have been employed in stages, where the machine at each stage often applies test methods that are redundant with those of other stages. Thus, it has been expensive to generate programs for automatic test equipment, as substantial amounts of programmer time have been required to write and debug a test program for each machine. Testing, therefore, is often the bottleneck to releasing a new product and the most expensive step in the circuit board production process.